ARhrrrr!

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

By merging graphics with props in the physical world, handheld Augmented Reality games pull the player through the small screen and into a larger merged play-space. Our primary motivation for this AR game was to explore fast-action first-person augmented reality, where the camera controls and movement that would typically require a mouse and keyboard are handled directly by simply moving the device. Advanced tracking technology allows the player to quickly zoom in and out and view the world at steep angles, making this a highly interactive and engaging game. Finally, we wanted to test tangible input mechanics, such as placing and shooting Skittles to trigger in-game events.

Hi, thanks for the encouragement. We’ve thought about doing just that, but hadn’t convinced ourselves it would fly. But, as you point out, amazing things happen on kickstarter! So, perhaps we should just go for it! I’d LOVE to make a real version of this game; I’ve been thinking about it for years now, and have a variety of ideas for how to go from “demo to real”. Perhaps it’s time …

DreaddJester

Just got a Nintendo 3DS and after playing the AR games on that I instantly remembered this game and wondered what ever became of it and if it ever came out. Would love to see this game and others like it on either phones or the 3DS. Honestly, selling it on the 3DS marketplace would seem like a perfect fit since that system is already set up to handle such games.

Others have been encouraging us to pursue funding through something like Kickstarter. We’re thinking about it. See the other posts/discussion between DreaddJester and I here; I’ve got many ideas that I’ve been developing over the years about how this game could go. We just need to figure out a realistic funding plan.

DreaddJester

Actually I thought about this game a bit more since my last post. I’m sure you already have ideas for gameplay but have you thought about the possibility of using a tile system for a game like this? Basicly you would have, lets say 8″ x 8″, tiles that you could put together to make a random city for each game. Each tile would represent the area of about one city block but would be split up the middle by roads. Some tiles might have a straight road, some curved corners roads, some dead ends, some would be crossroads. Certain tiles could even produce a specific type of zombie.

Now earlier I suggested the 8″x8″ format because at that size you could print the tiles out on your printer to get them. Even more fun could be had if people could create their own tiles although you might have to do that with some sort of program recognizable color combos and shapes. Roads are always black, certain types of buildins are grey, others are red or green, or pink with purple poka dots…… That way if people knew the color combos and shapes they could create their own tiles to make the map posibilites nearly endless.

Yes, that’s one of the ideas we had. If you look at many of the Zombie oriented board games (i.e., Zombies!, Last Night on Earth, etc), they do this very thing. We’ve also built tile-based games in the past (e.g., Art of Defense) that use tiles. AoD also had the idea of doing sketching on the tiles to add/control units, but it was technically hard to make it robust. I like the idea of reacting to the boards players create, although I think a more constrained version would be more tractable.

I actually had a group of students do a recreation of ARhrrr! a couple of years back, based on mashing it up with Zombies! I think it was a good way to go, but they didn’t get very far.

My personal plan would be to (a) redo ARhrrr! in Unity3D so it’s similar to the video but takes advantage of the newer/better engine, (b) expand the game so it has multiple levels and more depth, and then (c) take an approach like we’re talking about here to add tiles and make a similar but different game out of it.

DreaddJester

Sounds like good plans all around. I could see a lot of people out there really enjoying a game like this. It’s a game that creates a totally different playstyle than most other games. It meshes video gameplay with real tangible items and I think the world is really ready to embrace games like that. Just look at Skylanders for example.

I could actually see it going all “Magic The Gathering” in popularity if it were turned into a two player/multiplayer game and tiles were sold in packs. Of course that’s a whole different ball of wax. Conversly I could see it gaining popularity similar to Minecraft if players were able to create tiles and whole sites came out to host and spotlight player created tiles.

Rooster

You guys released the Nerdherder, so why no release this as well? I don’t understand your replay “Find someone to fund us to build it!”, it’s already built?? Release it, even as “do at your own risk-ware”!! 🙂 Or, if you seek a profit (and I won’t argue if that’s the motivation), hook up with the google revenue system, push ads, in-game ads, game start up ads, whatever.. Charge a couple bucks to download it, whatever. There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t all be enjoying that awesomeness right now. And as to the paper size issue that a user was going on about above.. Two simple choices come to my mind. Your nerdherders seems scalable.. Plays the same on my 42 in tv displaying the image as it does on a 8×11 paper.. So employ that tactic, whether it was intentional or coincidence.. Most computers/printers can do stitched printing so we at home can take your original size image and print it out spanning a 2×2 or 4×4 or whatever size grid needed.. Not a huge issue. But for the record, I am waiting on a release, alpha, beta or retail, and tons will too, once it hits the market, err Google Play or whatever they are calling it this week. 🙂 (or xda if ya wanna bypass the googlage for now!)

ARhrrr! was built to work on the Tegra devkit, running Windows Mobile and using a pile of custom APIs, completely built in native C++ and OpenGL ES. The code was all really custom to that device. It could be ported to iOS or Android, but it would essentially need to be rewritten. The easiest approach would be to redo it in Unity (like Nerdherder). But, it still requires an actual person to do it. Every now and again we think about reviving it, but can’t find a way to fund the folks who’d need to do the work.

eduardo

Its hard to believe you havent found the way yet to get this game out since he first demo. I´ve played the NerdHerder game and its a wonderful game.
Start a Kickstarter page and I´ll be the first one to put my money.
Keep up with it!!!

Basicly you would have, lets say 8″ x 8″, tiles that you could put together to make a random city for each game. Each tile would represent the area of about one city block but would be split up the middle by roads

Sure, you could do something like that. We have experimented with variations of this (including building on board games like “Zombies!”) but haven’t found anything we felt it was worth developing further.